yappin’
My inner monologue has always been chatty. As a child, my active brain felt like an endless source of entertainment, and then as an anxious adult, I felt that it talked too much. When I think about my hobbies and things I’m proficient at, it makes perfect sense that my verbal and introspective tendencies would translate to pen and stationery collecting, journaling, typing, blogging, chatting, and yappin’. Mostly yappin’. I spent a good chunk of my life as an anxious shy person and then one day, a switch flipped. It was like I gained a new super power and that super power was having an uncanny ability to annoy people.
I’ve observed that creative people tend to fall into two camps of thought when it concerns ideas: those who think ideas needs to be documented/saved, and those who think they need to be tempered. (There’s the healthy space in between, but that’s not fun to write about and I don’t think artists and other creative people are terribly healthy people.) David Lynch falls into the former camp, and is a filmmaker I’ve considered one of my heroes at least since I wrote that he’s a cute old man. Charles Tart, a psychologist and meditation teacher, falls into the latter. I became interested in his writing during the height of the pandemic when it felt like my thoughts were actively working against me.
Let’s borrow the language of David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish and imagine that ideas are like fish. For Lynch, ‘catching the big fish’ means you’re paying attention to your ideas and giving them the space to grow and evolve. For Tart, paying attention to your ideas is like shooting fish in a barrel—he thinks your brain tricks you into thinking every one of them is important and/or brilliant.
Lynch and Tart both meditate (the full title of Catching the Big Fish is Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity), but very differently. I haven’t paid $3k to learn transcendental meditation (Lynch’s practice), but I understand that practitioners are given a mantra by a teacher to repeat for an extended period every day. Tart’s meditation practice is informed by multiple philosophies (mainly Tibetan Buddhism) and includes techniques such as body scans to help quiet the mind.
While I aspire to be more like Tart, I think yappin’ is probably the lazy man’s transcendental meditation. I’m continually searching for louder things with which to clutter my mind instead of clearing space to focus on the quiet.